Andy sent it around to everyone at Kickstarter and it was obvious -- it had to be the building we had spent the last 4 years in.

I watched the video repeatedly, and knew it too, but I wanted proof.

So I started digging through my photos of the place.

When we first moved into the 4th floor of 155 Rivington, a decision was made to take down some of the drywall on the west wall:

The wall on the 4th floor after we removed the sheetrock in February 2012

Underneath we discovered graffiti that must have been at least 15 years old, probably older. My colleagues Alex and Tieg recognized the H₂O H/C/N/Y tag as from the band H₂O, a punk rock band started in NYC in 1995. Ensign, in the upper right, was also an local hardcore punk band, so they must have been there too.

Numerous Sick of It All fans have tattoos of the "Alleyway Dragon", the band's official logo. The Dragon is from a sheet of Greg Irons flash. It is not, as some people have claimed, a misappropriated gang symbol, but then the Alleyway Crew was never a gang to begin with. It was, and is, a group of friends. The dragon is a symbol of friendship as well as a way that members would relate who was hanging out at a particular gathering. The "Alleyway" is in a school yard in Flushing, Queens, where the band and all of their friends would gather.

The other acronyms, such as C.C.C. and D.M.S. and SNS are too hard to Google, but I'm sure if you were in the scene at the time you'd recognize them.

The biggest piece, however, was the big white REAS tag

REAS was a well known NYC graffiti artist who hit tons of spots in Manhattan and around NYC:

So I fired up R and after a couple of minutes of JSON-munging, threw together this graph plotting the # of available bikes per station against the total number of docks of that station:

Not surprisingly, there's a positive correlation with the number of docks a station has and the number of bikes available for that station.

But some of the outliers represent stations that are popular and have fewer bikes available, places where CitiBike Share might consider adding capacity. For example, East 33rd street and 1st avenue had 60 total docks, but 0 available bikes.

In contrast, stations like Park Place & Church Street (middle of the graph) lie on the identity line and represent stations with close (or exactly) 100% available bikes for their docks. They may be examples of over-provisioned stations.

I also colored the name of the station based on its latitude to give for a very rough proxy for how "downtown" the station was. This glosses over the fact that Brooklyn has a downtown which is distinct from what people normally consider NYC's downtown, but is interesting to note that some uptown stations (lighter blue) appear to cluster towards the right of the graph indicating uptown stations have been granted more total docks overall. More space in midtown I guess.

I'm not proud of the R code I used to hack this together, but I spent about 10 minutes on it:

The books that we choose to keep --let alone read-- can say a lot about who we are and how we see ourselves. In My Ideal Bookshelf, dozens of leading cultural figures share the books that matter to them most; books that define their dreams and ambitions and in many cases helped them find their way in the world. Contributors include Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Keller, Michael Chabon, Alice Waters, and Tony Hawk among many others.

As I observed Jane and Thessaly compile the book over the last year, I couldn't help but think about all the fun opportunities I could have exploring the data behind the shelves.

Contributor Neighbors

Each of the 101 contributors Thessaly interviewed picked as many books as they thought represented their ideal bookshelf, and I knew some of them would pick identical books.

So what would a taste graph linking contributors to each other using the books on their shelves look like?

Previously, I had worked with Cytoscape to render a network graphs, but this seemed like a good opportunity to make something interactive and also a perfect first project to really use d3. I can't wait to do more with it.

Each active link is then colored by the neighbor's profession. The nodes at the center of the graph have the most neighbors and exert the most pull over the rest of the graph. Try clicking and dragging a node to get a good feel for its centrality.

Genres and Professions

click for larger

The distribution of contributors professions skews heavily toward writers so all the professions aren't evenly represented: 41 out of the 101 bookshelves were from writers, and there were a total of total of 35 unique professions represented.

click for larger

In the graph above, I picked books chosen by professions which were represented by two or more contributors. Each circle is proportionally sized with the share of books chosen by the profession of the contributor.

For example, fiction books make up the plurality -- 31% -- of books chosen by writers. Similarly, 55% of the books chosen by photographers were classified as photography.

This next graph is a violin plot showing the distribution of page counts of the books chosen by each profession:

click for larger

Excluding the Oxford English Dictionary which comes in at 22,000 pages, legal scholars (Larry Lessig & Jonathan Zittrain) earned the highest average page count of 475, and all the books chosen by the two photographers had page counts under 500.

Year vs. Page Count

Taking it a step farther, here is almost every book (again, excluding the OED) based on the year it was published (X-axis) against the log10 of its page count (Y-axis).

The size of each point represents the number of ratings the book had accumulated on Google Books, and its color represents the book order the contributor placed it on their shelf.

click for larger

The darker the point, the farther on the left of the shelf the book was ordered. Conversely, small teal dots represent books with relatively fewer ratings which were placed towards the right of contributor's shelf.

Unfortunately, not all the books had publishing dates that made sense -- Google reported the dates of Shakespeare's works anywhere from 1853 to 1970 to 2010, and when would you say the Bible was published? 1380? 1450?

Excusing these erroneous points, I think the graph still works -- checkout the cluster of books published in the early 20th century chosen by the writers in the upper left of the graph: they represent popular early 20th century books with page counts between 200 and 500.

* Jane was only able to paint one volume of Stephen's OED for his shelf, but the authors agreed it could stand as a synedoche for his choice of the entire edition.

Overall...

The data I cobbled together from My Ideal Bookshelf is far from perfect, but I think it does a good job of illustrating some of the larger themes and relationships behind the book.

For example, the books of the two legal scholars tended to picked on average some of the longest books in the set, and that professionals tend to pick books related to their jobs (checkout the large proportion of photography books chosen by photographers). Also: if you're James Franco and pick a ton of books, you're gonna have a lot of neighbors in a network graph.

I also discovered how skewed the dataset was towards the choices of writers -- I jumped in expecting a diverse set of contributors which might be useful for representing an ideal ideal bookshelf -- but that would have been a difficult case to make when 40% of the contributors were from one profession.

This might sound like an obvious observation (and something I should have known having spent so much time thinking about the book), but it wasn't something I was able to really observe until looking at simple histogram of their professions. So remember: its always worth thinking critically about whether your samples are representative of the underlying distribution, and simple exploratory data analysis can really help you out there.

Bigger picture, I think this skew demonstrates the nature of coming up with an ideal list of anything: no matter who you ask, the task is essentially a subjective one. Here, it's biased towards the network Thessaly and Jane were able to tap to make the book.

Cleaning and Reconciling the Data

While creating the book Thessaly and Jane had carefully compiled an organized spreadsheet listing each contributor and their chosen books, but I knew there could be subtle typos here and there. These typos could possibly throw off the larger analysis: if the title of two books was even slightly off or missing some punctuation, then aggregating based on their titles would be problematic. I also wanted additional data about the books (data which Thessaly and Jane didn't record), such as the year the book was published, or the number of pages in the book.

So I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone and look for an API which I could automatically search using the title they had entered into the spreadsheet, and get a best-guess at the "true" book it represented. The API would also hopefully return a lot of useful metadata that I could use down the line.

It turns out Google's Book API is the perfect tool for such a job. I could send a book title to it and get back the book that Google thought I was looking for. This allowed me to lean heavily on Google's excellent search technology to reconcile book titles that might have had typos, while also retrieving the individual book's metadata. While I could have used something like Levenshtein distance to try to find book titles that were close to each other in the original dataset, I wouldn't have been able to retrieve any additional metadata.

Google's Book API allows 1,000 queries a day, but since the list contained thousands, I had to write in and ask for a quota-extension -- thanks to whomever at Google granted that -- I now get to hit it 10,000 times a day, which was enough to iterate building a script to compile the data.

Not surprisingly, Google's API returns a ton of metadata. Everything from a thumbnail representing the book's cover, to the number of pages, to the medium it was originally published, to its ISBN10 and ISBN13 ... the list goes on. I tried to choose fields that I knew would be interesting to aggregate on, but also ones that would help me uniquely identify the books.

One particular piece of metadata that was missing was the genre of the book -- only 28% of the books returned from Google had category information. Another option would have been to set up a Mechanical Turk Task to ask humans to try to determine the books' genres. This kind of book ontology is actually a very difficult and somewhat subjective problem. Just think of how complicated the Dewey Decimal system is.

Finally, not all data is created equal -- I've manually corrected a handful of incorrect classifications from Google where the search results clearly did return the right book, but its certainly possible not all books were recognized or reconciled properly.

The tools

Aside from d3 for the interactive plot at the top of this post, I used R and ggplot2 to create the static graphs.

The script I used to query the Google Books API was written in Ruby, and exported the data to a CSV which I then loaded into MySQL and Google Docs to manually review and spot check.

Here's the query I used to generate the data necessary for the force-directed graph:

SELECT
ideal_bookshelf_one.contributor_id as source,
ideal_bookshelf_one.google_title as book,
ideal_bookshelf_two.contributor_id as target
FROM
ideal_bookshelf as ideal_bookshelf_one,
ideal_bookshelf as ideal_bookshelf_two
WHERE
ideal_bookshelf_one.google_book_id = ideal_bookshelf_two.google_book_id
AND ideal_bookshelf_one.contributor_id != ideal_bookshelf_two.contributor_id

Sequel Pro's "Copy as JSON" was extremely helpful here -- it took relatively little effort to munge the SQL results into an array of nodes and links required by d3's force layout.

If you liked this post...

You could think of this post as telling the story of two Kickstarter projects. Since its a long post, here's a quick summary:

I recently ran a Kickstarter project.

I wanted to share all the financials and details of how I shipped my rewards.

I discovered we could do a better job helping creators process their backer's addresses.

We recently deployed a change to backer surveys that should do just that.

So I hope this post will educate Kickstarter creators on how to smoothly fulfill their rewards, but also shed a little light on how we do product development at Kickstarter.

The Kickstarter project was pretty simple -- I FOUGHT SOPA AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID T-SHIRT-- and the other project was actually a Kickstarter built by our product team, which we (and I use "we" loosely, Jed, Tieg, Daniella and Meaghan did all the work) shipped last week:

The address confirmation tool helps backers validate their addresses when filling out reward surveys from creators.

Just as Netflix or Amazon ask you to confirm your shipping address if it doesn't precisely match an exact address, Kickstarter will now ask backers to confirm a more precise one so that creators can feel more confident about shipping their rewards off. This feature also has the benefit of cutting down some of the data correction creators might face when shipping rewards.

The development of this feature is a good example of the of "dogfooding" your own product, which is software jargon for the act of actually using the tools you've built.

Dogfooding is one of the best possible ways to understand and improve your product, so I'm always interested in getting feedback from people that have run their own Kickstarter projects.

The SOPA shirt project was pretty straightforward. It only really had two reward tiers, but as with all Kickstarter fulfillment, there were a lot of details to get right.

Getting one of those details right -- backer addresses -- made me realize we needed a better way to ensure we were delivering valid backer mailing addresses to project creators at the most crucial part of their project: reward fulfillment.

I also want this post to serve as a bit of a guide for fulfilling Kickstarter projects on a similar scale. So first, some details on how I planned to fulfill my rewards.

Estimating Income and Costs

To determine my actual net dollars from Kickstarter, Amazon, and the credit card fees, I had to download a CSV of my account activity from Amazon's FPS platform, sum the pledges and subtract the credit card fees for each pledge.

The total cost of CC fees was 4.8%, Kickstarter's fee was 5%, so I yielded 90.2% of actual pledges, or $3,497.

I had a chicken and egg problem trying to estimate which shirts to even offer in the survey.

Since different shirt sizes and different colors were different prices (the cost per shirt varies from $6.32 for a Grey Small, to $12.95 for a White XXL), it was crucial to a rough estimate of what the shirt size and color choice distribution would be.

I knew a lot of people were going to order large and medium shirts, but if I had too many XXLs, it might not have been affordable to offer the white shirts. And if it turned out that I couldn’t afford the white shirts, I didn’t want to even offer the white shirts in the survey.

One observation is that the distribution of white shirts looks like it skews smaller. Anecdotally, that might be explained by women preferring the white shirt (again, anecdotal), and since women's sizes tend to run smaller, the distribution of white shirts had proportionally more smaller sizes.

Buying the Shirts

ApparelSource seems to operate multiple websites with basically the same layout and offerings. They had the best prices on CANVASshirts I could find, though oddly, the prices varied between their different sites by a couple of cents. Some sites had them in stock and others didn't. This made no sense to me because they're all being shipped from the same warehouse.

I ordered one of each shirt style to confirm they were the style I wanted, and then prepared to make the bulk order.

My order was extremely specific (13 Small White, etc.) so I think it raised some flags on ApparelSource's side. I had to spend some time working out the best way to pay them. It turned out paying them via PayPal was the easiest way.

Printing

Yancey had also suggested I check out Kayrock so I dropped them a line to get a quote. Kayrock had a source they recommended for buying the actual shirts which would have saved me over $1,000, but I wanted to stick with my choice of CANVAS shirts from ApparelSource because I had already tested their quality.

In the original email Kayrock had quoted the print job as “plastisol ink, no shirt rolling, no double hit, no handling fee, no rush fee, no production prepress, no color change fee“, and gave me the quote of $479 + $80 for printing and setup.

What they didn’t tell me, was that if I didn't use their apparel quote and instead had the shirts shipped to them directly, they were going to charge me $0.40 cents per shirt of handling. This added $100 to the total cost, so my Kayrock fees were $660.

Despite this issue, their work and responsiveness over e-mail was very good, and I would recommend checking them out if you're interested in some great NY screen printing.

Once Kayrock finished printing the shirts that I had shipped directly to them, I headed to Greenpoint to pick them up myself so I could start packing and sending t-shirts from Kickstarter HQ.

Backer Addresses and Postage

In general, backer addresses tended to be malformed in a couple of ways. The first was that people tended confuse "Line 1" and "Line 2" -- they either put their Apt # first, then street, or their Street then company.

I also ran into problems with 20+ addresses from the North East because their zip-codes were had their leading zeros removed.

Zip codes like 06897 became 6897 when opened in Google Docs or Excel because they were converted to numbers.

In addition someone put “Meow, Meow” as their address. They didn't get their shirt.

To save on shipping, I did my research and chose First Class mail, which let me specify the ounces for each package. After weighing each style of shirt in an envelope (I correctly assumed the labels weren't going to add any more weight), I had three tiers:

S / M white - 5oz - $1.98 postage

M / L shirts - 6oz - $2.15 postage

XL, XXL shirts - 7oz - $2.31 postage

Sorting by whose shirts had already been delivered (all KSR staff, some friends and family), and removing those people from my CSV yielded 183 packages, summing to $370. I'd recommend keeping careful track of the rewards you ship vs. the rewards you intend to hand deliver.

The cost to ship the same shirts using flat rate envelopes would have been $942.45, so I managed to save a lot by carefully weighing and picking First Class mail instead.

After having lunch with my mom on a Saturday, she offered to help me stuff envelopes and ship the shirts. This was actually a lot of fun and I always forget how rewarding manual labor can be when the majority of my day to day work involves keyboards and LCD screens.

My mom suggested to come up with a color coded system to manage shirt sizes & colors (envelopes marked with Blue represented a Large White shirt, for example). This worked well, but only because I had access to many different colored Sharpies.

Fulfillment would have been chaos without some kind of organized system for tracking sizes and colors.

Tyvek envelopes are great, until you realize they’re a little pricey; Staples sold 50 for $28, so $0.56 per envelope which added to the shipping cost. I probably could have ordered them for free from USPS if I had planned the shipping session in advance. In general I highly recommend using Tyvek envelopes as they’re much lighter, waterproof, and probably more durable than the cardboard flat-rate envelopes.

Endicia Software

I’m not sure how I would have addressed and processed all the envelopes without Endicia which is batch mailing software. I get the feeling many other creators have used it to fulfill their rewards. Endicia is free to use for 30 days, and then $15 a month to keep using it afterwards.

The software allows you to import a CSV, but the requirements are very strict. The fields must be (in the following order):

Name

Company

Address1

Address2

City

State

Zip

In order to correlate each person with a label and envelope with a t-shirt, I merged their size and color selection into the name field. So it looked like this for a XXL Grey shirt:

John Smith XXL/G
3105 Sturges Ridge
Santa Rosa, California 95401

This might have been a little odd for backers (are there privacy implications for exposing their shirt size to the post master?), but Endicia didn’t allow any other fields, so there was no where else to put this information on the label.

I bought $500 worth of postage, but only ended up using $370, and was able to get a refund for the left over balance when I canceled my Endicia account.

Printing Labels

Printing labels from Endicia is very scary. You are shown this dialog box (but replace 7 with 180, worth $370):

I did one test print of a label and it seemed OK, so I went with through with the big batch. After that Endicia automatically opened a file inside my /tmp/private directory with a number of rejected addresses, most of which had the ZIP code problem. This was a time consuming and stressful process because any mistake would mean lost money on postage.

After I was done printing the postage from Endicia, I realized I could have sent the batch to a PDF instead of the actual printer, and it would have mitigated some of the risk. Without storing my labels somewhere, if my printer had gone off line or my computer would have crashed, it was unclear how I would recover labels that were still stuck in the queue. I hated trusting the printer software this much, but the overall process went pretty smoothly.

Internal Kickstarter Post-Mortem

Once I shipped my shirts, I wrote up an internal email to Kickstarter staff detailing my fulfillment process. That email became the kernel for a number of discussions about how we could better improve the data processing creators face when delivering their rewards to backers.

One solution to the dirty-address problem was to use an external service to validate the addresses supplied by backers.

Using an external service to validate backer addresses turned out to solve two problems.

First, it would ensure backers had the chance to confirm a valid address, which is always a good thing. Second, it would add a hyphen and the 4-digit add-on to US zip-codes, converting zip-codes like 11217 to strings such as 11217-1142.

That extra hyphen would prevent applications like Google Docs and Excel from converting zip-codes like 06897 into numbers like 6897 (technically, the application would recognize the cell as containing a string so it wouldn't attempt integer coercion).

Preventing zip-codes from losing their preceding zero would mean software like Endicia wouldn't reject addresses from the North East. So we decided to give it a shot.

First, Jed did research on what external services we might like to use. Strike Iron emerged as one of the best options, so we began sending legacy addresses to their API in order to evaluate how many they'd be able to validate and correct. This back testing showed that Strike Iron would be able to supply valid addresses for the vast majority of the sample of the surveys we tried. It also showed that Strike Iron would even be able to suggest corrections for many otherwise undeliverable addresses.

Since then, its been really exciting to watch Jed and Tieg build the actual data flow, and I'm super proud of how it turned out.

So even though this is a somewhat behind-the-scenes change in the way Kickstarter processes data, its exciting to know that it will make the lives of many creators just a little bit easier.

When I heard that Tyler Gray at Public Knowledge was looking for someone to do some analysis on tweets that mentioned SOPA, I thought I might try Cytoscape (an open source tool used for biomedical research, but handy for large scale data visualization) to show some of the relationships between people discussing the controversial bill on Twitter.

The result is a graph of the most active users referencing SOPA

Public Knowledge worked with the Brick Factory to set up their slurp140 tool to record approximately 1.5 million tweets which Tyler sent me in the form 350mb CSV file. I first used Google Refine to clean and narrow the set down to only tweets which were replies to someone else. This left approximately 80,000 tweets which I then imported into R. I then ranked all of usernames by how often they appeared both as senders and recipients, and then picked the approximate top 1,000 users. Since replies are sent from one user to another, the graph is directed: each edge has a direction with an origin and an arrow pointing at the recipient. There are 1,021 nodes identified by their Twitter usernames, and 1,757 edges a good portion of which are labeled with the content of their tweet.

Visualizing networks this large is more of an art than a science

I've tried to strike a balance between visual complexity, aesthetics and readability of tweets, but you'll find that this isn't always successful. Sometimes tweets run into nodes, sometimes edges run into labels, and sometimes the graph feels like a total mess. But that messiness is part of what made the SOPA debate on so interesting over the last month.

Thousands of people participating with plenty of cross talk.

The colors and sizes of the nodes and edges are coded in the following ways:

Edge thickness represents "edge betweeness" which is how many "shortest paths" that run through it. This is a rough measure of how central a given tweet is in a network. (Ex: @declanm and @mmasnick have a thick line connecting them because many other nodes are connected to the two through that tweet.)

Edge color represents the language of the tweet. (Ex: Tweets in English are blue, Spanish are yellow.)

Thanks again to Public Knowledge, The Brick Factory for providing the infrastructure to record the tweets, and everyone who has helped fight against SOPA and PIPA over the last couple of months, especially those who tweeted about it.

There's one pointed question I've seen crop up in a number of conversations about the settlement:

Isn't it wrong that Andy chose to pay the licensing fees for the music but not for the photograph?

This question makes the assumption that Andy could have paid the licensing fees to Maisel like he did for the music. He couldn't have. This is because Jay Maisel refused to license the image and there's no compulsory license for photography like there is for musical compositions.

A compulsory license is what it sounds like: the owner of the underlying musical composition is required, by law, to license it to anyone who wants to use it at a predetermined rate. This prohibits song writers from picking and choosing who gets to perform their works. It also allows Andy to license, at a fair rate, the underlying song compositions from a Miles Davis album to make a new album of original recordings (remember, copyrights to recordings are different from copyrights to the compositions of a song).

The copyright of photographic works, unlike works of music composition, is not subject to a compulsory license.

This means that photographers, unlike song writers, can forbid anyone from reusing their work, whether it is for a poster or for an album cover.

Now, artists like Jay Maisel obviously enjoy this absolute control over their work because it lets them dictate who uses their art and when. Song writers, unfortunately aren't afforded to this their published works.

So while no one could have prevented Andy from recording an album of remixed music written by Miles Davis -- not even Miles Davis himself if he were alive -- the same does not hold for a photo of Miles Davis.

Remember, Maisel admitted he would have refused to license to Andy the rights to the photo. So Andy's only option, short of not using the photo at all, was to use the 8-bit remix cover and wager it was a fair use.

That Andy could, in one case, hire artists to legally remix music by paying a compulsory license, but in another case had to make an expensive and risky bet on fair use (a bet that didn't pan out) feels unfair.

Put another way: why are composers required to license their compositions at a fair rate to anyone, but yet virtually every other type of artist doesn't have to play by the same rule?

I doubt anyone would argue that song composition is a lesser art or any less deserving of full royalties than other arts.

One reason is that the practicalities of compulsory rights for photographs (and other works) are hard to imagine. Music compositions are written, then performed, then recorded, whereas photographs are snapped and then printed. There's no underlying right in a photograph (thank goodness) to its "composition" like there is for a piece of music. So that is part of why compulsory licenses for photos don't exist.

But I think another part of the story is that the law has evolved the musical compulsory license as an implicit acknowledgement that music compositions are both maleable and fundamental components to our culture. Compulsory licenses make possible everything from karaoke bars to cover bands to remixes like Andy's. The alternative -- allocating complete power to composers over who reuses their work -- yields transactional costs on culture that are simply too high. The law hasn't felt the same way for the visual works.

So will other art forms, like photography, adopt compulsory licenses? I doubt it, but I can't help but they'd be a great compromise in light of Andy's settlement. I asked Andy over email whether he would have paid a mechanical license for the photo:

"Absolutely. If the laws and protocols for remixing photos were as clear and fair as covering music, I would've bought a mechanical license for the photo in a heartbeat. But the laws around visual art are frustratingly vague, and requiring someone's permission to create art that doesn't affect the market for the original doesn't seem right. I didn't think it would be a problem, especially considering the scope of my project, but I was wrong. Nobody should need a law degree to understand whether art is legal or not."

I did a panel on Crowdsourcing at SXSW this spring with Lukas, the CEO of CrowdFlower. Even if you made it to that, you should definitely know about this great event at NYU on April 13th:

CrowdFlower and NYU present: NYC Crowdsourcing MeetupJoin CrowdFlower for its first ever New York City meetup co-hosted with NYU

Wednesday, April 136:30-9pm44 West 4th Street, room M3-110

Pizza, beer, and thought provoking conversation about the future of work.
Come listen, ask, and debate how crowdsourcing is changing everything from philanthropy and urban planing to creative design and enterprise solutions.

Confirmed Speakers:

Bartek Ringwelski, CEO and Co-Founder of SkillSlatePanos Ipeirotis, Associate Professor at Stern School of Business, NYU
Lukas Biewald, CEO and Co-Founder of CrowdFlower
Amanda Michel, Director of Distributed Reporting at ProPublicaTrebor Scholz, Associate Professor in Media & Culture at The New School University
Todd Carter, CEO and Co-Founder of Tagasauris

I want to order two 4G Motorola modems for a redundant Internet connection at work.

I call the Sprint phone number to determine price, terms of service and what their refund policy is.

The telephone sales representative sounds like he's communicating through a CB radio from Southern India. He gets pushy and wants me to sign up right then and there, but I say no thanks, I'll try to go into the store and do it. That was my first mistake. There must be a Sprint store near where I work, and indeed, I find one on Google Maps. I call the phone number and listen to a beep-beep-beep-boop-this-number-has-been-disconnected message. I try Google maps to find the phone number on the side of the awning, call that number, no one picks up.

I locate another Sprint store, in the West village, and call them to ask if they have the modems in stock. Nope. Do they get them in often? Nope. Do they know of any other stores that might carry them? Nope. Is it something that stores even carry? Not really, the woman on the phone has never seen them stock and is pretty sure I have to order them online. I begin to order the modem online and get a Request Timeout error that looks like its from a default Apache configuration. This does not inspire a lot of confidence.

Bad

Finally get to the end of the online order form and am told that there is a problem with my account -- my identity and credit needs to be verified further, and an email is sent to the same effect, encouraging me to call a phone number for more information. I call said phone number only to be told my information isn't in the system, and that Sprint can't help me yet. I need to wait between 24 and 48 hours to call back to verify my information. OK. I call back in the next couple of hours and try to get to the bottom of what they need from me: a copy of a utility bill with our information faxed into a number with a cover sheet with my email, an Application Number (not order number) in order to verify my identity.

I send the fax and wait.

The next day, with no confirmation or indication that they've been able to verify my identity, I call back and ask what the status of my order is. I wait on hold.

Worse

That is strange, Sprint says, they can't find any evidence of my fax being sent in.

It turns out the representative that handled my previous call didn't make a "note" of the impending fax so therefore no one thought to look for it.

Where did my fax go? Sprint isn't sure, they can't say because my order didn't have a note in it saying that a fax was coming. So I just sent my utility bill to your fax machine and now no one knows what happened to it? Yes, that appears to be the case.

I'm going to have to send the fax in again, but this time they'll make a note of it and be sure that it will be associated with my order. Will I get any confirmation that they've received my fax? Can I check? No, a credit department representative will be in contact with me within 24-48 hours to tell me whether I have enough credit to order the modems. How? They'll either call or email.

Two days later an email arrives from Sprint's Business Credit department saying that a line has been approved for me and that I am eligible for up to 5 devices and a $150 deposit per device and so on. I reply: OK does that mean my order can go through? No, the Business Credit department informs me that they do not handle orders. What should I do now? I have to call one of another dozen Sprint phone numbers (if anyone needs a company directory, let me know, I got 'em all).

I get back on the phone with Sprint with someone who sounds more competent than the rest of the people I've been dealing with. She shows a modicum of empathy. "I'm just trying to give your company money. I want to be a customer and you're making this very difficult for me." "Yes, I understand" she says and starts dealing with the credit department.

Hold music and an advertisement from Sprint warning of the dangers of App Stores and espousing their company's "personalization" taunts me. They play it over and over again and again and I try to remember to beg the representatives to just put me on silent hold so I won't have to listen to this. But every time I forget and start to understand the potential of repetitive auditory stimula for inducing psychosis.

Finally the woman comes back on to tell me that we'll have to cancel the old order and try again. Does that mean I have to give you all the information I gave the website over the phone? No. But what she really means is yes. Yes, that is exactly what I'm going to have to do: as she goes through the list of information I recognize every question as a field from Sprint's online checkout form. My own name and business address cease being meaningful concepts as I mumble them drearily into the phone.

More hold.

She's back: ok we're almost there. We need to charge the credit card. Get the credit card.

Getting the credit card. After an hour on hold, I can hear the excitement in both of our voices.

Whose credit card is this? Its the company card. Who is that?

Can I speak to the card holder please? No, he's our CEO and is very busy right now.

The only way we can charge that card is if I speak to the cardholder.

I hand my boss the phone and he says yes and gets asked what he just agreed to.

Back on the phone with woman, ready to charge the card for the deposit plus first month of the modems. So very close.

The credit card was denied. My boss gets a phone call, its American Express verifying the charges. He spends 10 minutes on the phone with Amex trying to navigate their voice prompts to allow Sprint to charge our card.

Finally the modems are charged, and I get sent a confirmation email from Sprint for the new order.

Terrible

Back at work, Monday morning, check the status of the account: Your order has been canceled. Please call Sprint for more details.

I get passed from one person to another, and signing off, the first person says to me: for more information on your order, you can check sprint.com/myorder. I tell him that the reason I'm calling is that that page told me to call this number. He repeats himself and hangs up.

After half an hour on the phone, having talked to 4 different people, and at least one manager, I'm told that Sprint cannot verify my identity and they are incapable of fulfilling my order (or any order) over the phone. This concept no longer makes any sense to me, but I'm defeated at this point.

Surreal

Is there any possible way I can order these modems? Yes, I'm told, I can go to a store and order them.

What? Your stores don't carry the modems. The stores told me to order them from the web.

Let me find you a store sir.

My apologies, sir, but our store locator is broken.

So I can't order two modems from you-- I can't become your customer because your store locator is broken?

Maybe there's a store outside of the city you can go to.

I have to leave NYC to order a modem from your company?

Our store locator isn't working.

Do you have any idea when it will work?

No, they haven't given us a time frame when it will work.

So not only can't I order from your website, but I can't even determine which stores I could go to?

I'm sorry sir.

They ask me for a new zip code and I give it to them. 10 minutes of hold later, I'm given 3 different stores with 3 different phone numbers. I call the first store.

Do you carry the modems?

No, you can only get them on the website because they're for home use.

Sprint told me that I could get a store like yours to verify my identity and then I could order the modems over the web. Does that make sense to you?

Yes, that makes sense, but we can't actually do that because we're not actually a Sprint store.

So I was just told to call a store that Sprint thinks is a Sprint store but isn't actually a Sprint store?

You'll have to go to the main Sprint store to verify your identity. The one on 23rd.

Sell your Sprint Stock

It is no mystery that Sprint is not doing well, and many people believe they are on the verge of bankruptcy. With sales (not customer) service like this, that's not surprising. It shouldn't be this hard to become a customer of anyone's business.